[filleokus]

As mentioned in the thread and expanded on the blog [0] moxie is also against the whole idea of federation and multiple clients.

I think my perception has changed in the last ≈ 10 years, to be more leaning in moxie's direction. It's hard enough to design something secure and usable, having to try and support all different implementations under the sun makes most federated approaches never reach any mass adoption.

Even though it's not a one-to-one analog I also think e.g the lack of crypto agility in Wireshark was a very good decision, the same with QUIC having explicit anti-ossification (e.g encrypted headers). Giving enterprise middle boxes the chance to meddle in things is just setting things to hurt for everyone else.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

[mort96]

I don't think it's a problem that they're against federation. I think federation is nice, but it has some clear trade-offs, and I don't feel like it's something Signal needs.

I don't even think they have to officially support third party clients or provide a stable API. I'd have no problem if they just occasionally made API changes which broke unofficial clients until their developers updated them.

But I really don't like that they're so openly hostile to the idea of other people "using their servers for free", with the threat of technical blocks and legal action which that implies. Especially not when their official client is as bad as it is. (Again, it's fucking blurry!)